the succession of species.1 A more illegitimate inference could hardly be conceived. (h) Against the notion of evolution as an improving or creative process stands the geological fact admitted by Le Conte: "Although species, so far as individual numbers are concerned, come in gradually on the margin of their natural region, reach their greatest abundance in the middle portion, and again gradually die out on the other margin, yet in specific characters we see usually no such transition. In specific character they seem to come in suddenly, to remain substantially unchanged throughout their range, and pass out suddenly on the other margin. . . . The apparent fixity of animal species within certain narrow limits of variation is even more striking than in the case of plants." This is directly in conflict with the hypothesis of a gradual evolution of species from one into another. The force and largeness of this fact is seen in Barrande's tabulated exhibit of his discoveries in the Silurian of Bohemia. After an accurate study of its 640 species of brachiapods in their geographical and geological range, with respect to the question of evolutionary relation to each other, he gives his finding as follows: 4. New species without known ancestors,. 65 per cent.3 Such absence of transitional forms in the supposed 1 As by Haeckel in "The Evolution of Man." "Elements of Geology," pp. 157-158. Given by Prof. J. W. Dawson, Princeton Review, November, linkage leaves the evolutional account by successive modifications simply an hypothesis, even as to the animal world.1 (i) Evolution is incompetent to account for instinct. So long as this immense and wonderful phenomenon is left without solution, the theory cannot be held as proved. Every attempt evolution has made to explain instinct, especially in its higher forms, has broken down in contradiction and absurdity. As an unreasoning impulse that operates for ends which it knows nothing of, it certainly looks like "lapsed intelligence," as Darwin and others have viewed it. The only account offered is that it is the fruit of intelligence, a habit formed by rational, purposive action, at earlier stage, the product of a process minus the process. But this explanation as "lapsed intelligence" is in direct contradiction of the fundamental law of evolution, a progress from the lower to the higher, from the simpler to the more complex, attaining at last to the lofty and aspiring rational faculties of humanity. And where are the traces, in all the past, of the intelligent ancestors of the bee or the sphex, or like types of instinct? Both Darwin and Romanes acknowledge that "many instincts are too low in the zoological scale to admit of our supposing that they can ever have been due to ancestral intelligence. In so far as their origin and special forms have been credited to "accidental variations" and "natural selections "—or rather destructions the case is no better. For how could it be possible for such variations and selections, in the realm of non-intelligence, in and of themselves, to construct 2 1 Nicholson's "Life History of the Earth," p. 373. organisms or the instincts of organisms to do the work of intelligence? ) Evolution fails to account for language. The essential presupposition to language, as a characteristic of man, is the ability to think in concepts, abstract idealizations, expressed by general or class terms. It is a far other and higher reality than the cries by which physiological or instinctive action serves as a directive means among animal orders. There is no evidence of "language" in any creature of earth but man. It is said, indeed, that when the evolutional advance reached the ability to think in concepts and the human stage was attained-the transition made from the mechanical action of physiology and instinct into free rational thought and idealization-then emergent man began to build up registering vocabularies and languages. But there is no assuring evidence either that any non-speaking animal, even at the highest point of reach, has ever crossed that line, or that there is a psychical possibility of doing so. Inasmuch as "no traces of man's progenitors, either of the first, second, third, or any other generation, have been found," there is an utter break, physiologically, of the linkage by which an actual physical descent with transition into capacities of thought and speech might be proved. But the difficulty becomes still more perplexing when, of the only asserted line of the supposed descent, some “simian of arboreal habits," the confession has to be made that none of the simians yet discovered, whether fossil or living, are found with the requisite preconditions for the transition. When Mr. Romanes says that "anthropoid 1 The missing links not being found in fact, they have been invented. For example: "Haeckel claims that the species of ape to which man is traceable lived in the middle tertiary period, and disap 1 apes are the most intelligent and would, under training, probably show greater aptitude in sign-making than any other kind of brute," but yet confesses that "the species (or genus) which did give origin to it must have differed in important respects from any of its existing allies," in being "more social" in habits and "more vociferous" than any existing species, all of which "appear to be on the high road to extinction," there is no wonder that Prof. Max Müller declares: "Against such argument the gods would fight in vain. We are told that man is descended from some kind of anthropoid ape. We answer that all anthropoid apes known to us are neither social nor vociferous. And we are told in that case man must be derived from an extinct ape who differed from all known apes, and was both social and vociferous. Surely, if this is a scientific argument, scientific arguments would in future rank very low indeed. I know of no book which has proved more clearly that language forms an impassable barrier between man and beast than the book lately published by Mr. Romanes on the "Origin of the Human 'Faculty,' though his object was the very reverse." 2 peared long ago. Out of this species was evolved the man-ape or anthropoid, and out of them the ape-man, or the speechless man, the progenitor of true or speaking man. These two missing links, together with the species of apes out of which they were evolved, are supposed to have existed on a hypothetical continent between Madagascar and the Island of Sunda. This continent, to which Haeckel has even given a name, Lemuria, sank into the sea and carried with it all those supposed men-apes and ape-men; so that we need hope for no discovery of them until the sea shall give up her dead, when progenitor and progeny shall have the joy of a happy reunion." Rishell's "Foundations of the Christian Faith," pp. 207-208. 1 "Mental Evolution in Man." 'The Open Court, Chicago, December, 1891. (k) Evolution has also failed to explain Conscience or the Moral Power. This is too phenomenal a characteristic of man to be ignored in any view of his origin. It is to be fully admitted that the reality and authority of the conscience do not depend upon the mode of God's creative action in incorporating it as constituent of man's endowment, but upon the fact of it. But in claiming evolution as the mode, the hypothesis is logically required to show evidence of it, or at least the possibility of it. Here is the point of failure. The incompetence of the only offered explanation in a positive way -the theory asserting conscience to be the "result of accumulated experiences of utility, gradually organized and inherited "-leaves no pending theory of it. That account misses the explanation of the moral faculty by the whole breadth of the essential difference between utility" and "right" or ethical obligation. The formidable difficulty of making credible even the possibility of such derivative origin is still pressing. Keeping in view the fact that the very center of the conscience function appears in the regulation, and often denial, of inherited feelings and habits, the difficulty of attributing its creation to hereditary action is palpably apparent. It has been well pointed out that the injunctions of the conscience do not run with the stream of our hereditary tendencies, but against them. That a law of the work and victory of hereditary forces should issue in organizing an endowment for control and repression of hereditary tendencies seems too much of a contradiction to be accepted. Even in the theistic form of the theory, in which evolution offers itself as presenting not the cause 1 Herbert Spencer, "Data of Ethics," sec. 45. "The Crisis in Morals," James T. Bixby, Ph. D., 1889. |